Texting from the Oregon Trail

Teaching the last two weeks of school was a bit of a challenge.  As you can imagine, students (and teachers) are a bit “done” and worksheets, though never in the plans anyway, were definitely NOT an option.  I also had to contend with the fact that I had been a little too ambitious in my planning and needed to adjust some assignments and activities in order to make sure the students would have final products each of the units.  I mention all of this because I wanted to share the fun activity that was born from a time crunch and a desperate need for an attention grabbing/interest holding activity for 5^th graders in June.  The units were on Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion, and the students spent time participating in a variety of activities including 2 Webquests, an outside “simulation” that had the students settling across the country as they learned about each land acquisition, an Art Walk that illustrated Westward Expansion, and the final activity—Texting from the Oregon Trail.

              I am including a link to the Webquest that I created for this activity at the bottom of this entry.  Basically, in the interest of time, I had to cut out a longer assignment and instead of having students create journal entries from the trail, I had them create a texting conversation between themselves and friend or family member.  The activity included a research component where, through the Webquest, they were directed to different websites to research the Oregon Trail.  They were given two graphic organizers to fill out, one with the research details that needed to be included in the conversation, and one with “text bubbles” to fill in for a rough draft of their texting conversation. 

The students couldn’t wait to get to the fake texting site, so they were highly motivated to do the research component of the Webquest.  Some students even wanted to create a group text between friends that were at different places on the trail.  The activity was originally scheduled to happen during one of the long blocks (60 minutes) that 5^th graders have for Social Studies 3 days a week, but ended up having to be moved up a day, only giving us 45 minutes to complete the activity.  The 45 minute class was plenty of time to do the research and rough draft, and a few of the students were able to complete the actual text messages as well, but most ended up having to complete the assignment for homework.  The students were excited about playing with the Fake iPhone SMS Generator, so they had no problem finishing the assignment at home--and then moving on to create additional fake texts for their own purposes, I’m sure!  

Texting from the Oregon Trail Webquest